Re: Low Lantecy Soundcard for Laptop Gig

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On 30 jul 2007, at 05.20, Krispen Hartung wrote:

> That's right. But you mean firewire 400, I take it? I think it is a  
> bit more than "a little" right? I'm reading
> that the spec for CardBus is 132 Mbps, vs 393 Mbps of FireWire 400.  
> See below. Is anyone making an audio interface that utilizes  
> firewire 800 specs?

Oh, yes. It should go that FireWire 400 is "a little" faster compared  
to USB2. Before getting the RME FireFace400 I have always worked with  
FireWire 800, because that is what Mac's run on, but I can't detect  
any bad side of the 400 protocol for the work I put it to. All my  
hard drives are still FW800 though, but I have colleges that do multi  
track recordings to FW400 drives and they can definitely handle 20 -  
30 audio tracks without choking the streams. For live looping you  
rarely use more than two streams, one input and one output, so the  
headroom should be big enough.

The only bad side of FW 400 I have seen is the crappy jacks used on  
Window's PC's. You have to use a little converter cable instead of  
plugging it into a real FireWire jack, as you do on a Mac. And of  
course, Window's machines don't power up FireWire units by the  
FireWire cable. I don't regard that a big problem either, as long as  
you remember to bring the converter cable and the power supply for  
the interface. At my working place I constantly keep the converter  
cable plugged into the Mobius PC and the power supply plugged into  
the FireFace, so I only need to swap the FW cable between the Macs  
and the PC to use the FireFace with a different system.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)